warm_enema
New Member
"White college boys, hollering requests to the "combo" up on the stand. Eastern prep-school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain sphinctering of the lips so it comes out ehisshehwle...they reel, they roister. Aspidistras, giant philodendrons, green broad leaves and jungle palms go hanging int the dimness..two bartenders, a very fair West Indian, slight, with a mustache, and his running-mate black as a hand in an evening glove, are moving endlessly in front of the deep, the oceanic mirror that swallows most of the room into metal shadows...the hundred bottles hold their light only briefly before itflows away into the mirror...even when someone bends to light a cigarette, the flame reflects back in there only as dark, sunset orange. Slothrop can't even see his own white face. A woman turns to look at him from a table. Her eyes tell him, in the instant, what he is. The mouth harp in his pocket reverts to brass iertia. A weight. A jive accessory. But he packs it everywhere he goes.
Upstairs in the men's room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries, chef's salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, after-dinner mints, a Clark bar, apound of salted peanuts, and the cherry from some Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned. With no warning, as tears stream out his eyes, PLOP goes the harp into the, aagghh, the loathsome toilet! Immediate little bubbles slide up its bright flanks, up brown wood surfaces, some varnished some lip-worn, these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp's descent toward stone-white cervix and into lower night...Someday the U.S Army will provide him with shirts whose pockets he can button. But in these prewar days he can rely only on the starch in his snow-white Arrow to hold the pocket stuck together enough to keep objects from...But no, no, fool, the harp has fallen, remember? the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain (it's raining aginst a window somewhere, and outside on top of a sheetmetal vent on the roof: cold Boston rain) then quenched in the water streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit. There's no calling it back. Either he lets the harp go, his siler chances of song, or he has to follow.
Follow? Red, the egro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? "Cherokee" bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. Bu more musicians have floundered in the channel to "Cherokee" than have got through from end to end. All those long, long notes..what're they up to, all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in Nw York, drive fast maybe get there for the las set--on 7th Ave., between 139th and 140th, tonight, "Yardbird" Parker is finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gunor something man he must be out of his mind 32nd notes demisemiquavers say it very (demisemiquaver) fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig that coming out of Dan Wall's Chili House and down the street--shit, out in all kinds of streets (his trip, by '39, well begun: down inside his most affirmative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking death he sel) out over the airwaves, into the society gigs, someday as far as what seeps out hidden speakers in the city elevators and in all the markets, his bird's singing, to gainsay the Man's lullabies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly overdubbed trings...So that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in "Cherokee," the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit...
If Slothrop follows that harp down the toilet it'll have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that's just what a fella doesn't want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart--and he feels the cold Lysol air on his thighs as down come the boxer shorts too, now, with the colorful bass lures and trout flies on them. He struggles to work himself farther into the toilet hole as dimly, up through the smell water, comes the sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into the white men's room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving around the way they do singing, "Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!" and the voice that replies is who but that Red, the shoeshine boy who's slicked up Slothrop's black patents a dozen times down on his knees jes poppin' dat rag to beat the band...now Red the very tall, skinny, extravagantly conked redhead Negro shoeshine boy who's just been "Red" to all the Harvard Fellas--"Say Red, any of those Sheiks in the drawer?""How 'bout another lucky changin' phone number there, Red?"--this Negro whose true name now halfway down the toilet comes at last to Slothrop's hearing--as a thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream comes sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valey--the true name is Malcom, and all the black cocks know him, Malcolm, have known him all along--Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist sez, "Good golly he sure is all asshole ain't he?" Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs protrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, up the wall of the white bowl. "Grab him'fo' he gits away!" "Yowzah!" Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but thes insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all..."
Upstairs in the men's room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries, chef's salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, after-dinner mints, a Clark bar, apound of salted peanuts, and the cherry from some Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned. With no warning, as tears stream out his eyes, PLOP goes the harp into the, aagghh, the loathsome toilet! Immediate little bubbles slide up its bright flanks, up brown wood surfaces, some varnished some lip-worn, these fine silver seeds stripping loose along the harp's descent toward stone-white cervix and into lower night...Someday the U.S Army will provide him with shirts whose pockets he can button. But in these prewar days he can rely only on the starch in his snow-white Arrow to hold the pocket stuck together enough to keep objects from...But no, no, fool, the harp has fallen, remember? the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain (it's raining aginst a window somewhere, and outside on top of a sheetmetal vent on the roof: cold Boston rain) then quenched in the water streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit. There's no calling it back. Either he lets the harp go, his siler chances of song, or he has to follow.
Follow? Red, the egro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? "Cherokee" bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song playing is one more lie about white crimes. Bu more musicians have floundered in the channel to "Cherokee" than have got through from end to end. All those long, long notes..what're they up to, all that time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in Nw York, drive fast maybe get there for the las set--on 7th Ave., between 139th and 140th, tonight, "Yardbird" Parker is finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gunor something man he must be out of his mind 32nd notes demisemiquavers say it very (demisemiquaver) fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig that coming out of Dan Wall's Chili House and down the street--shit, out in all kinds of streets (his trip, by '39, well begun: down inside his most affirmative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old Mister fucking death he sel) out over the airwaves, into the society gigs, someday as far as what seeps out hidden speakers in the city elevators and in all the markets, his bird's singing, to gainsay the Man's lullabies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly overdubbed trings...So that prophecy, even up here on rainy Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in "Cherokee," the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really weird shit...
If Slothrop follows that harp down the toilet it'll have to be headfirst, which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and with Negroes around that's just what a fella doesn't want, his face down in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his legs apart--and he feels the cold Lysol air on his thighs as down come the boxer shorts too, now, with the colorful bass lures and trout flies on them. He struggles to work himself farther into the toilet hole as dimly, up through the smell water, comes the sound of a whole dark gang of awful Negroes come yelling happily into the white men's room, converging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving around the way they do singing, "Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!" and the voice that replies is who but that Red, the shoeshine boy who's slicked up Slothrop's black patents a dozen times down on his knees jes poppin' dat rag to beat the band...now Red the very tall, skinny, extravagantly conked redhead Negro shoeshine boy who's just been "Red" to all the Harvard Fellas--"Say Red, any of those Sheiks in the drawer?""How 'bout another lucky changin' phone number there, Red?"--this Negro whose true name now halfway down the toilet comes at last to Slothrop's hearing--as a thick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream comes sliding down the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like topo lines up a river valey--the true name is Malcom, and all the black cocks know him, Malcolm, have known him all along--Red Malcolm the Unthinkable Nihilist sez, "Good golly he sure is all asshole ain't he?" Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs protrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, up the wall of the white bowl. "Grab him'fo' he gits away!" "Yowzah!" Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his garters and tug at argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in, but thes insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet by now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all..."
